I fished today with Steve and Lisa N. of Temple, and their 6 year old grandson, Caleb.

This pair of 18″ hybrid came out of a “wolfpack” of about 6 fish we spotted on sonar seconds before they struck.

When the tongue came out, the hybrid began to tremble.

The fish I am finding on Belton right now are suspended and just refuse to hit anything going vertically. I worked over the same stretch of water as several “regulars” today — mostly retired fellow that fish all the time. They were slabbing and their catch was in the single digits today whereas we ended up with 33 fish and could have kept right on catching but had to be considerate of the attention span of the 6 year old in our party.

Today’s trip was a typical, average summertime trip. We caught fish steadily over just about the entire duration of the trip, save on lull from around 8:00 to 8:20. At 9:00 to 9:35 we saw the peak activity for the morning. During off-peak times, we’d have to pass over 5-6 pods of fish, each pod containing 3-8 fish, in order to get one fish to bite. During the peak we got fish from every other pod we passed over.

We downrigged for 100% of our trip today boating fish from the patch of water found along the trace from Area 478 to 488 to 814 up until around 8:25. The action slowed here and I made a move to test the waters from Area 833 to Area 846. We picked up 3 small fish here over about a 35 minute span. I decided to leave these fish and go back to the patch of water found along the trace from Area 478 to 488 to 814, as we had left a lot of fish there showing on sonar but just not biting.

As we arrived here, the fish were right where we’d left them. We were fortunate in that we boated a healthy white bass the regurgitated its morning meal at boatside. I observed that the fish it had eaten were smaller than the presentation we were using, so, I downsized our lures and from that time on we kept rods popping on both hybrid and white bass. The downsizing of our lures made a very distinct difference in our success.

By around 10am young Caleb had reach the limits of his attention span and we thought it wise to wrap up the trip then and there as grandma, grandpa, and I had all run out of tricks to delay our departure any longer.

By trip’s end our tally stood at 33 fish, all caught and released, and which included 5 keeper hybrid, all right at the 18.00 to 18.50 inch mark.

TALLY = 33 FISH, all caught and released

TODAY’S CONDITIONS:

Start Time: 6:30a

End Time: 10:15a

Air Temp: 76F at trip’s start.

Water Surface Temp: ~84.8F

Wind: Winds were SSE5 at trip’s start, slowly turning S6.

Skies: Skies were ~20% cumulus clouds on a blue sky.